Create a date night jar to add some excitement to your relationship! Bottom of the post has a list of date night ideas, ranging from expensive trips to free stay-at-home dates. A great DIY gift for Valentine’s Day!

Zach and I finally made a Date Night Jar! I kept seeing friends of mine make them and thought, “I need one of those, too.” Finally, we got it in our heads to go ahead and make one…because sometimes we just can’t think of things to do together. Quite frankly, I get tired of each of us sitting on a computer and doing whatever for the rest of the night. So…date night jar!

Some people like to pull out a date night idea and then stick to it. Generally what we do it use it as a reminder that there are plenty of things for us to do together. And we sift through it until we find one we’re really interested in…unless we can’t decide. Then we just do whatever we pull out.

Mostly this jar is a reminder that our relationship only stagnates because we let it. Our hope is that this jar will help us get it together when we start to feel that way.

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Date Night Jar

Step 01: We spent hours searching the Internet, trying to come up with ideas for our jar. I went here and here. I copied down some of their ideas, which inspired us to come up with our own. (I’ll show you my list in a moment.)

Once I found ideas I was happy with, I wrote them down on the popsicle sticks. (The first time I did this, I used regular sticks, painted them, wrote on the front, and put glitter glue on the back. This time, I got dyed sticks–WAY easier–and I wrote on both sites.)

Step 02: Decorate your jar. I spray painted the lid with chalkboard paint (because it was all I had) and put a piece of scrapbook paper on it.

Step 03: Make a label. I spray painted a piece of paper that I cut into the shape of an oval. Then I wrote on it with a white paint pen.

And you’re done! I made a little bow out of some baker’s twine and stuck it on there, too.

Date night ideas:

Stay-at-Home:

Some of these are free and some we have to pay for. But all are done at home. We tried to keep the expense low.

Free:

These are things we can do for free outside the house. There aren’t very many, but we have extra sticks in case we think of more.

Bike ride

Hiking

Planetarium show

Wine tasting

Go to the library and read together

Cheap or Affordable:

These are all relatively cheap things outside of the home that require no planning.

Coffee date

Restaurant (pick a number and then find that number on Yelp)

Read at a bookstore or library

Dinner + private book club

Mini golf

Dinner + Movie

Team Trivia Night

Buy a new board game

A trip to the mall (even to just walk around)

Expensive and Requires Planning:

As the description says, these cost money and require more planning. These are things we won’t do very often.

Trip to the zoo (because this is an hour and a half away in Pittsburgh, it requires a whole day’s commitment)

Bed & breakfast

Murder Mystery Night

Weekend away

Dave & Buster’s

Couple’s massage

Trip to the mall

Fancy restaurant

Hotel for one night

Spend a day at a theme park

Go tubing (water or snow)

We also have sticks for holidays! Obviously, we’ll only keep these in the jar around the holiday season.

Fall/Halloween:

Decorate jack-o-lanterns

Visit a haunted house or penitentiary (Moundsville Penitentiary is very close to our hometown)

American Horror Story marathon

Scary movie night

Cornfield maze + hot apple cider

Fright Night at a theme park

Fright Farm

Winter/Christmas:

Christmas movies + cocoa + cookies

Drive around looking at Christmas lights

Decorate the tree

Make ornaments

Snowball fight / build a snowman + cocoa

That’s all we’ve been able to think of so far. I’ll update this if I add more! I recommend making one of these, especially if you find yourself just doing the same boring things over and over again. We’re very excited about our jar. Actually, we just did three of the date nights this weekend (though we rolled them into one night). We saw The World’s End (which was hilarious), had dinner at a Mexican place we (I) had never been to before, played some board games, and then spent the rest of the night drinking and running through Nightmare mode in Diablo III. It was a pretty good day.

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My name is Chelsey. I write mostly about cooking, but I sometimes I like to delve into knitting and share some of the secrets I've uncovered about being a successful blogger. You can also find me on Growing Up Gabel as a contributing author!
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